The Yid
The Yid is a black comedy set during the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot of 1953, a ruthless pogrom that nearly sealed Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s reputation as history’s maddest, meanest and most murderous tyrant.
Old and crazy Solomon Levinson is a former actor from the Yiddish theater and a former Red Army cavalryman. His ability to execute Nijinsky-style soaring leaps while brandishing cavalry sabers enables him to escape liquidation by the Secret Police. Levinson decides that he must kill Stalin before Stalin can kill him. Together with a motley gang of conspirators who represent various strains of anti-Stalinism and who argue endlessly about the meaning of history, Marxist-Leninism, racism, Shakespeare, theatre, Judaism and medieval folklore, Levinson sets out to kill Stalin.
Levinson and his friends speak in a spicy mélange of English and transliterated Yiddish and Russian that is surprisingly reader-friendly. What many readers will have trouble with are the frequent graphic descriptions of violent, gooey, messy death. This is not gratuitous, however. Stalin used the fear of torture to terrorize the people he ruled, so torture and mutilation form a necessary counterpoint to the hijinks depicted in the story.
The publisher’s PR describes this novel as “a crazy Soviet Ragtime,” a narrative that balances philosophy and farce to reveal some home truths about “an individual’s place in the scope of history.” It is more a muddle of points of view and frequent digressions. Like Leacock’s rider, the story “gallops off in all directions.” The ritual murder passage that is intended to be the climax of the book is way too long and manages the difficult feat of simultaneously jumping the shark and being tedious.
